This book provides students with a concise and practical guide that presents key understandings of the tourist experience and provides strategic guidance on how to develop an impactful and memorable experience. Chapters follow the path of the tourist journey, firstly exploring consumer behaviour, the decision-making process and the tourist’s need for escape, and providing insights into the strategic implications of consumer behaviour and the concept of immersion in tourism. Subsequent chapters look at the impact of experiences; consider trends in tourism experience such as wellness, sustainability, authenticity and fantasy; and provide experience design models. The final chapter offers a unique ten-step approach to designing impactful and memorable tourist experiences. Highly practical and engaging, this book is packed full of case studies and examples, from forest bathing in Finland to truffle hunting in Italy, as well as tools and exercises to guide the design process. This book offers students a full understanding of how the experience is lived from the tourist perspective, how tourism providers can manage that process and how to develop successful experimental marketing interventions. This is essential reading for all tourism students and future tourism managers.

One of UNWTO's top sellers!!! This publication represents a major contribution to developing professionalism in the field of destination management. It is intended as a practical guide, showing how concepts of destination management may be translated into practice. Besides it will be of considerable interest to academics as we acknowledge the work of other experts and academic leaders who have contributed to the field of destination management. As the main purpose of Destination Management Organisations is to attract people to visit in the first place, this practical guide will explain through models, guidelines and snapshot case studies how to create a suitable environment and quality delivery on the ground and how to ensure that visitors' expectations are met at the destination.

The planning, design, management and marketing of experiences for tourism markets is a major challenge for tourism destinations and providers in a globalized and highly competitive market. This book bridges the gap in contemporary literature by carefully examining the management and marketing of tourism experiences.

The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Experience Management and Marketing offers a comprehensive and thorough inquiry into both customary and emergent issues of tourism experience and co-creation. Drawing together contributions from 83 authors from 28 countries with varied backgrounds and interdisciplinary interests, the handbook highlights multiple representations and interpretations of the theme. It also integrates a selection of illustrative global case studies to effectively present its chapter contents. Tourism experience drives the contemporary tourist’s behavior as they travel in pursuit of experiencing unique and unusual destinations and activities. Creating a memorable and enduring experience is therefore a prerequisite for the all tourism business organizations irrespective of the nature of their products or services. This handbook focuses on conceptualizing, designing, staging, managing and marketing paradigms of tourism experiences from both supply and demand perspectives. It sheds substantial light on the contemporary theories, practices and future developments in the arena of experiential tourism management and marketing. Encompassing the latest thinking and research themes, this will be an essential reference for upper-level students, researchers, academics and industry practitioners of hospitality as well as those of tourism, gastronomy, management, marketing, consumer behavior, cultural studies, development studies and international business, encouraging dialogue across disciplinary boundaries.

Offering an overview of current issues around design, marketing and management of experiences from the tourist perspective, this comprehensive Handbook critically reviews the key debates and developments within the field. Empirical chapters by international contributors explore a range of perspectives, challenges, opportunities for future research and best managerial practices.

To consume tourism is to consume experiences. An understanding of the ways in which tourists experience the places and people they visit is therefore fundamental to the study of the consumption of tourism. Consequently, it is not surprising that attention has long been paid in the tourism literature to particular perspectives on the tourist experience, including demand factors, tourist motivation, typologies of tourists and issues related to authenticity, commodification, image and perception. However, as tourism has continued to expand in both scale and scope, and as tourists’ needs and expectations have become more diverse and complex in response to transformations in the dynamic socio-cultural world of tourism, so too have tourist experiences. Tourist Experience provides a focused analysis into tourist experiences that reflect their ever-increasing diversity and complexity, and their significance and meaning to tourists themselves. Written by leading international scholars, it offers new insights into emergent behaviours, motivations and sought meanings on the part of tourists based on five contemporary themes determined by current research activity in tourism experience: dark tourism experiences, experiencing poor places, sport tourism experiences, writing the tourist experience and researching tourist experiences: methodological approaches. The book critically explores these experiences from multidisciplinary perspectives and includes case studies from a wide range of geographical regions. By analyzing these contemporary tourist experiences, the book will provide further understanding of the consumption of tourism.